


Flowers and Stardust

by songofstars



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Childhood Friends, Flower Crowns, Fluff, Inconsistent Writing, M/M, Pre-Kerberos Mission, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-06-13 19:48:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15372030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/songofstars/pseuds/songofstars
Summary: Keith first met Shiro at a space summer camp.“Hey. I’m Shiro.” Keith looked up from his drawing to see a kid, maybe a year or so older than himself with his arm extended for a handshake. Normally he didn’t mingle with other people, but something about this person made Keith take notice. Maybe it was the say he smiled, the way he met Keith’s eyes, the kind aura he imposed.“Keith.” He shook Shiro’s hand.“Keith. That’s a nice name,” Shiro replied, and Keith smiled.Or: Keith and Shiro as they were far before Kerberos. Shiro teaches Keith how to smile.





	Flowers and Stardust

**Author's Note:**

> For Kailey. I used the flowers Purple Pansy - You occupy my thoughts, and Baby’s Breath - Innocence; Pure of heart  
> This is before all the info about Keith’s past from season 6, so for the purposes of this fic, Shiro’s a little less than one year older than Keith.  
> Thank you also to skysight49 for being amazing and beta-ing this fic.

Keith first met Shiro at a space summer camp.

“Hey. I’m Shiro.” Keith looked up from his drawing to see a kid, maybe a year or so older than himself with his arm extended for a handshake. Normally he didn’t mingle with other people, but something about this person made Keith take notice. Maybe it was the say he smiled, the way he met Keith’s eyes, the kind aura he imposed.

“Keith.” He shook Shiro’s hand.

“Keith. That’s a nice name,” Shiro replied, and Keith smiled.

~~~

Just a few days later, Keith’s dad and Shiro’s parents had taken them to a field to let the kids play and burn off steam. Keith’s dad had been overjoyed Keith was socializing, and jumped at the first opportunity for him to make an everlasting friend. Not only that, he could see that Shiro was good for him. Keith smiled more easily around Shiro.

Laughter drew the parents’ attention to where Keith and Shiro were playing, carefree and innocent. They had gathered piles of flowers from the fields and tossed them at each other, shrieking with delight. When they had calmed down a little, they gathered up the flowers and wove them into flower crowns. Both were shaky and unpracticed, but beautiful nonetheless—Keith’s made of shades of red and Shiro’s of dark purple, both with small white buds speckled in-between.

They traded flower crowns before they went their separate ways. Both of them wore theirs for the rest of the day.

~~~

Keith learned more about Shiro over the next years as they grew up together.

He learned Shiro lived exactly seven houses down the street from him. That he had a giant family in Japan that he visited every summer. How he couldn’t cook to save his life and had once nearly burned down the house trying.

Keith learned that Shiro’s older sibling had gone to the Galaxy Garrison to chase dreams of stars and space and discovery. He learned that Shiro also dreamed of being a pilot, then an astronaut, just like Keith himself did. That he also had a certain hunger, an everlasting drive to walk among the stars.

(He learned that Shiro had a great smile that made his eyes light up just ever so slightly. That when Shiro laughed it compelled everyone else in the room to laugh along as well. He allowed himself to hope he would be able to hear it all the time in the future.)

Somewhere, along the years, Keith had decided that he was going to go to the Galaxy Garrison too. He was going to go become a pilot and see the stars someday.

~~~

Then it was winter, and it was harder to find reasons to smile. Keith’s father had passed away a week ago. He’d been a firefighter, and that weekend there’d been a particularly urgent call. He hadn’t made it back. His father had always told him that one day he might not come back home, but it never felt like something that could actually happen.

When no one answered the door to the small house that Keith had shared with his father, Shiro used the key under the doormat to make his way in. He crossed the main room and knocked cautiously on the door to Keith’s bedroom. The light from the street outside shone through the window slats across the paper that Keith’s dad had left there last week.

Shiro slowly pushed open the door to Keith’s bedroom. Keith sat on his bed, eyes staring unseeing ahead. He didn’t move or make a sound, even when Shiro sat down next to him on the bed.

Shiro didn’t say anything, just placed a hand on his shoulder.

Over the next days turned weeks turned months, Shiro was the one who brought him back to reality. Who made him smile again and told him the world was going to be alright. A few months later, the flowers bloomed, and Keith believed it too.

~~~

They got the letters at the same time.

He’d been waiting for this day, ever since he’d received the email that testing results for the Galaxy Garrison would be sent the week of April 27th. It was April 29th.

As soon as the mail deliverer pulled away, Keith grabbed all the letters from the mailbox, checked that the acceptance letter was among them, dropped the rest and ran for Shiro’s house down the street.

“Shiro?? Shiro, are you there? Shiro?” Keith pounded on Shiro’s door, envelope in hand. Finally he emerged, tiredly rubbing his eyes.

“Shiro! The results are in.”

“What’re you- they what?” Shiro was wide awake now, running out to the mailbox and searching for his letter.

“At the same time?”

“Same time.”

They tore open the letters, ripping the canvas to shreds.

“Did you-?”

“I got in! You-?”

“Me too!”

That night they fell asleep in the field of flowers, naming the constellations and dreaming of the stars.

~~~

“Is that it?” Keith pointed up at the ship. It was the morning of the Kerberos mission launch and the sun shone bright and clear overhead.

“That’s it.”

Shiro’s hand burned in his. The wind circled around them, but his hand stayed firmly heated.

“I, um. I made you something.” He let go to rummage in his bag, and Keith immediately missed his warmth. But he forgot about it when Shiro pulled something light and colorful out of his jacket pocket.

“Is that—”

“Yeah.” In Shiro’s outstretched hands, created solely with real purple pansies and woven a dozen times more delicately than the ones they made years ago, was a flower crown. Keith carefully took it and rested it on his own head, taking care to make sure it wasn’t blown away by the fierce wind.

“Thank you, Shiro,” he sighed, turning his gaze towards the spaceship. “I’ll miss you.”

“It won’t be that long. I’ll be back before you know it.”

Keith nodded, letting himself savor this last moment with Shiro before he had to leave. He could almost imagine that if he just held onto Shiro’s hand, he could make him stay.

~~~

They said loss grew easier with time. In a shack in the middle of the desert, one person was about to prove them wrong.

Keith stomped in, covered in dust and sand with sweat running down his forehead. He sat down at his desk, not even bothering to close the door.

Behind him hung a decaying flower crown, thrown to the valleys of time. Its once brilliant purple petals lay withered and dead, hanging limply like a corpse, but Keith couldn’t bring himself to throw it away. Still, he skirted his gaze around it, never able to face the accusation of all the ways he had failed.

This wasn’t about friendship. This wasn’t about love. This was about bringing Shiro home, no matter what it took.

~~~

It’s been a year.

A year since Kerberos. A year since the Garrison. A year since Keith saw Shiro for the last time.

It took a year for Shiro to come home, crashing in the desert in an alien spacecraft and escaping along with three other cadets on the back of the Keith’s hoverbike. The same one he and Shiro had once gone for joyrides on in the town on weekends at the Garrison.

He knows neither of them are the same people they were before. Keith has barely seen another person for a year, and he’s sure Shiro’s had much worse than that. But Shiro’s here now, and that’s all that matters. With his warm hand grasping Shiro’s metal one, Keith closes his eyes, and finally lets himself rest.


End file.
